Historical Linguistics and Cognitive Science

In this paper we investigate possible links between historical linguistics and cognitive science, or theory of the mind. Our primary goal is to demonstrate that historically documented processes of a certain type, i.e. those relating to semantic change and grammaticalization, form a unified theoretical bundle which gives insight into the cognitive processes at work in language organization and evolution. We reject the notion that historical phenomena are excluded from cognitive speculation on the grounds that they are untestable. Rather, we argue for an extension of Labov’s uniformitarian doctrine, which states “that the same mechanisms which operated to produce the large-scale changes of the past may be observed operating in the current changes taking place around us.” (Labov, 1972:161). This principle is transferable to the current context in the following way: first, language as a system is no different today than it was millennia ago, easily as far back as diachronic speculation is likely to take us; and second, the human brain is structurally no different today from the brain of humans of up to ten thousand years ago. The cognitivelinguistic parallelism between the past and the present makes speculation possible, in this case about codeswitching, even if it is not testable in the laboratory. It further allows us to make forward and backward inferences about both language change and its cognitive underpinnings.